Maybe Just a Thread
by DancingPhalangess
Summary: Captain Swan AU. She never comes without a droop at the corners of her mouth, but he still can't push her away. One shot.


**This took me so long to write as my muse and motivation tragically died in one another's arms more than a year ago. This is in honour of their memory. **

He knows she's lying when she tells him she's eighteen, but he's been watching her all night, wondering what it would be like to run his hands along the dip of her waist, the curve of her hips. He's imagined leaving a burning trail from her mouth to her stomach, scorched with his lips. He's felt the threads of her curls between his fingers as he watched them tumble around her shoulders and hide the glint of her eyes.

So when she presses the curves of her body into the dips of his and brushes her lips against the stubble surrounding his jaw, he is more than happy to give her what she wants. He catches her lips first, kissing her for the taste of alcohol and when his tongue detects only the faintest tinge, he bends deeper. She tastes like blueberries and for some reason, cinnamon.

The bedroom is already taken, so they find the garden shed and laugh when they bring a trowel and paintbrushes raining around them. He brushes a cobweb from her forehead and kisses her again in the dark.

"Can I at least have your name?"

"You can have a lot more than that," she whispers, her words tickling his ear before her lips sweep away the tingle and replace it with flames.

oOo

Her cover is blown when he moves in the last of his boxes the next morning and catches a blur of her barrelling down the stairwell. He watches her trip a few steps from the bottom and hurtle through space until he lunges and catches her in a bundle. His arm is locked around her chest and he can feel her heart thudding behind it.

"You be careful there, love," he warns. "I wouldn't want you ruining that pretty blonde head." Her eyes grow in surprise before she rolls them at him, but then casts a last glance back up the stairs she'd nearly broken her neck on and bolts. He stares into the same spot she had, something hard and dark stirring inside him at the sound of thundering voices throwing themselves after the woman who'd fallen into his arms for the second time in twenty four hours.

oOo

He bites into his jam on toast at the same moment as a knock pounds through the tiny apartment. He takes it with him, getting ready to swear at a beaming man in a charity jacket because he _is _the poor. But the person standing on the other side isn't a man, and neither is she wearing a _Save the Children _logo. Her hair is the same mess of blonde curls as it had been when she'd almost fallen on top of him, except now they are streaked with a smudge of dirt that sweeps along her cheekbone too.

He grins.

"Ah, are you here to reveal your identity at last?"

She rolls her eyes again and sweeps right past him. He crams the last of the toast into his mouth and flings the door shut behind them. He's barely swallowed before her lips are crushing themselves against his. His arms slip around her waist and tucked them both together as he nibbles on her lip and feels her groan into his mouth. He forgets about the plate with the lone, cold slice of toast until he throws her into it and it shatters on the kitchen floor. Then she is gone from his punishing grip, her back pressed against the plastic counter as she gapes at the mess.

She cowers like he'd picked up the plate and launched it at _her, _until her own shame tugs her back into reality. She laughs, shakily and ignores his creased expression. "That's not how it happens in movies." Then she steps forwards to catch him again, but he backs away and touches her lips with his thumb.

"Only if you tell me your name, love," he teases. "I'm Killian Jones."

She watchs him for a few seconds, her eyes narrowing to snake like slits, as if she is scrutinizing whether to trust him with such delicate information. "Emma," she says after an unsettling silence. "Swan."

"Swan?" Killian repeats. "It suits you."

He kisses her before she can ask him what he means. Maybe she just doesn't want to know.

oOo

After that, they become _friends with benefits. _Except less of the friends part. He never sees her without a droop on the corners of her mouth.

oOo

"So how old are you really, Swan?" He asks between dips into her neck. Her hand creeping downwards almost distracts him, but he catches it with a chuckle and threads his fingers through hers. "I'm curious as to just how badly I'm breaking the law." He waits for her answer with another kiss to her neck and grins against her light skin at the tiny shiver that shakes her.

"Seventeen," she says after a pause. "The first time I was sixteen." Only a two year difference then. It's nothing compared to that creepy Edward Cullen bloke that the sisters next door are always gushing about.

He pins their clasped hands above her head and runs his fingers down her arm, stroking the curve of her elbow, the delicate veil on her wrist. He notices a tiny circle scar on the back of her hand, between her index finger and thumb and he feels a twist inside him, an ache to bend down and chase away the pain behind it with the touch of his lips, but he distracts his mouth by dipping his tongue into hers.

"Happy belated birthday, love," he murmurs as he pulls away and she frowns, her eyes glinting with what he can only read as confusion, and a hint of wonder. She blinks and it's masked, but the image of it is etched into his memory and suddenly he wishes he had known on the day. They could have had cake. He's sure the icing would have tasted so much better on her skin.

oOo

"So you live upstairs?" It's less a question and more of a prompt and she shrugs.

"Sure do," she supplies and he waits patiently for more while their catch their breath amongst his tangled sheets. "With my foster parents," she says in a beat and then her lips clamp together and he knows she won't be telling him about promises of a forever family and toasted marshmallows on the hob. "What about you?" she shoots back through almost closed lips.

"Nothing interesting there, love. My father left me when I was just a boy. My brother raised me from then, he still calls to check up on me." Her forehead creases at that and he knows what she's thinking, and he's never been more grateful for Liam.

There's something else stirring inside him though. Something that has nothing to do with her mouth finding its way along his jawline; something else that caught his gaze at that first party and never let it go. It hadn't been the curls curtaining the glinting ice of her eyes, but the empty stages they had hidden. A place long since abandoned by pretending actors.

She's a lost girl.

oOo

The knock is more of a slap and it's accompanied by words strung together in a barely coherent slur. "Killian, open the door, I wanna taste your-" he opens it before the whole hall hears her desired menu.

"Swan!" he hisses before she tumbles into him, her arms hooking around his neck.

"Have sex with me," she demands, sending a wave of foul smelling whiskey to assault him. She raises onto her toes, but before their lips can brush, she loses the small balance she has and carts them both into the kitchen counter. "Ow, Swan!" he mutters before taking her shoulders and pushing her gently but firmly away from him.

His skin is burning for her, but she's had too much to drink to know what she wants. _But you've slept together before, _says the creep in his ear. _It's not like she'd be saying no if she was sober. _Killian stuffs that part of him down deep enough so he can no longer hear it. He's not a good guy, but he's not _that _guy either.

"What's wrong, you find someone else?" Her tone is teasing, but the corners of her mouth waver in their fixed grin, something close to fear flashing in her eyes. He knows that look. It was the same one he wore in the weeks after his father left whenever Liam had left him with a baby sitter, or asked the neighbour to watch over him as he ran to the store. The fear that he, too, would abandon him.

"I'm always fighting them away, love, but I thought this was just sex?"

She frowns through her drunken haze. "Yeah, just sex. No more than sex. Sex," she says, as if trying the word out on her tongue. She looks up at him. "Do you wanna have sex?"

"Trust me, you won't thank me for it later."

"Oh, I will," she murmurs in what's meant to be a seductive voice, kissing his neck. Except she's sloppy and she probably used far more tongue than she intended. He pushes her head away gently and cups her face in his hands, as if he can soften the rejection that way.

"Emma." He never calls her that. It's either love or Swan. But he hasn't missed the raw redness circling her eyes or the crystal tears that still cling to her lashes. Her name makes her look at him. Really look at him. She loses the hazy smile and when she blinks, fresh tears spill down her cheeks. As he wipes them away with his thumbs, he notices her unnatural whiteness.

He leads her to his couch and keeps her in his line of sight when he doubles back to the kitchen to make her a drink. Comforting coca or sobering coffee? _You could always provide the comfort, _says the voice that won't shut up. He almost growls aloud.

Coca. Definitely the coca.

He even remembers to add cinnamon. _When had she told him that detail?_

He sets it down in front of her and keeps hold of his own. He almost drops it in surprise when she nestles into him, her head on his shoulder and her arms draped around his waist. Ignoring the flushing heat further down, he puts a hesitant arm around her shoulders. He doesn't mind the closeness, but he fears she will be embarrassed when she's more sober.

"Do you want to talk about it, Swan?"

He thinks she's not going to answer until she does.

"Called my social worker," she mumbles into him and he struggles to hear, to find the pieces that broke her so he can put them back together. "I wanted her to move me, but she said I was just being difficult, that I wasn't even trying to get along with them." She pauses and he tightens his arm, searching for something to say, but she's not finished. "She said they were my last chance. When they dump me, it's just the group home until I age out next year. They're my last chance at a family, and to them I'm just a meal ticket."

Rage burns his insides to hot ashes. He might not be a good man, certainly not good enough to love her, but he believes in loyalty, in _good form, _and using a homeless teenager to pay for a holiday is neither of those things. He wonders if she's ever been treated like a person and is suddenly very, _very _glad he did not take advantage. That would have made him just like them.

"What will they do if you don't go back tonight?"

She shrugs. "Not sure they'll notice."

He grins through the new surge of anger and brushes her hair with his fingers. "Then you're staying over to sleep it off."

"But we're not having sex," she mumbles, her voice strange with drink and his shirt.

"If you don't think you can keep your hands to yourself, Swan, by all means go back."

She makes a feeble attempt to punch him, but her fist merely grazes his chest and he gets his revenge by slipping his free arm beneath her knees and swinging her into his arms as he stands. She shrieks, but her arms curl around his neck and he feels the warm weight of her head on his shoulder.

She doesn't question it as he carries her, the alcohol making her placid and trusting. He lets her down on his bed and she curls onto her side before he can tell her to, her fists scrunching around his bed sheet like she's on the edge of a pit of fire.

"Night Swan," he mutters, a part of him hoping she will ask him to stay, but he remembers as he walks away with a dropping heart, that Emma Swan would never be so cliché.

oOo

365 days and none of them are as bad as this one. He's spent the past three of them with his brother in the dirtiest bar they could find, but this time, he's hesitant when the knock sounds at his door. He doesn't want to leave her. Her place is right above his, and at night he likes to listen out for her footsteps. He's sure he knows which ones are hers by now. They aren't the thudding drag, they're too heavy. They aren't the tapping ballet dancer's, they're too dainty. Neither are they the double pairs that race over his bed like they're trying to run to the edge of the world. They're too eager.

He's almost sure her footsteps are the quiet ones, the firm ones. The footsteps of someone who's been taught her whole life that she should be invisible, but is stubborn enough to be seen anyway.

He hears them in the dull morning hours dawn cracks her eyes open and splits her light through his curtains. They're occasional, broken by long pauses that somehow bring soft strokes of comfort in the tiny hours.

He wants to be there for her, but the first gleam of sunlight brings his brother knocking. It's not too early. It is Father's _Day, _not evening. They're drinking can't wait until an acceptable hour. He knows, even without the presence of her barely morning footsteps, that she knows what day it is too.

But he goes anyway, because it's his brother and he barely knows Emma really. He's hardly had a full conversation with her, and only once did their words not follow sex. He doesn't know if she even remembers.

So he downs miscoloured rum until his own memories are as smudged as the glass.

He barely remembers her name until it flashes up on his screen, but at the sound of her strangled, gasping breath from the other end, the haze is banished from his head.

"Swan?" he demands. "Emma, what's wrong?"

He doesn't understand why his heart is pounding so hard he wonders how his chest can contain it. He doesn't understand why the bar is still spinning but not because of the alcohol. He doesn't understand the hitch in his own voice. All he understands is that the two man party is over.

She garbles out an address he barely makes out, her words slurred and choked and then there's a gentle thud and a horrible silence. He assumes she told him where she was, but there is a scream in his head that is far too loud to hear any other suggestions. He tells his brother he's _got _to go, because Liam's never allowed him to leave before closing time, and stumbles from the bar. Then he finds a taxi and repeats the uncertain address to the muttering driver. He throws the notes without looking at the fare.

The apartment is bursting with people. They bump into him, spilling cheap beer out of plastic cups and he growls at them all, checking they aren't Emma before sweeping them aside. He knows they won't be though, she's crying, and when she can't hide her emotions she hides herself.

He opens doors, calling her name, searching every corner until he sees a huddled shape spilled with blonde curls.

"Emma." He runs to her, chanting her name like a healing mantra, but she cowers, swatting him away with a hand that's drenched in her tears.

"Emma." That time it's a plea it lifts her head like the word itself was a puppet thread. She blinks at him with swimming eyes.

"It's okay," she tells him, but it's not. She's crying, it can't be okay.

"No it's not," he almost snaps and she stares like he's said he's the pope. "Swan," he tries more gently. "You called me."

She nods, but although he can tell from the glaze in her eyes that she's been drinking, she's not leaning on him now. There's inches between them that he doesn't close, waiting for her to come to him.

She catches the next tears that fall and presses her hands to her eyes until the others stop trying. "It's okay," she repeats and his arms twitch to shake her. "I- I wanted to have sex but you weren't home so I came here and found someone else, but then I changed my mind and-" she blurts it out in a breath, the words merging together so they barely make sense, but he catches what he needs to. Then his arms twitch to shake someone else. Until their brain beats to mush against their skull.

"I kicked him in the balls," she blurts and his eyes crinkle with a gleam of pride. "I kicked him until he fell and then I ran in here and I called. I'm sorry, I didn't need to."

"Yes you did," he argues again and earns himself another startled glance. He reaches out, brushing the back of her hand gently with his fingertips and there's a flutter in his heart when she turns her palm to meet his.

She stares at swept wisps of a cobweb in a top corner. "Thank-you," she forces. "For coming."

He smiles. Locks their fingers together. "Anytime, Swan."

He doesn't help her to her feet, or move her to the bed, because the corner's as good of a place as any. Instead he promises her he will be right back and is sure to make as much noise as he can when he's out of her site in the attached bathroom so she knows he's still there.

He emerges with a damp cloth, but when he sits back down beside her (kneeling would be far too patronising), she takes it from his hands and dabs away her own tears. He has a sinking feeling she is far too used to doing it this way to even entertain the thought of letting _him. _She does a bad job, leaving mascara streaks along the arch of her cheekbone, stroking into her hairline, but the tears are gone and the redness is paling to pink.

"Sorry about today," Emma mumbles and Killian knows she's not just talking about calling him.

They sleep together that night curled on a spare bed of a stranger's house, waking up to dull thumps, raised voices, slamming doors and uninvited guests, but the corners of Emma's mouth are relaxed instead of drawn and she is still there when dawn dusts the floor with golden streaks.

oOo

"What are you doing for Christmas?" the words roll casually off his tongue, but her body is suddenly tight under his arm.

"I don't know," she says, finally. Stiffly. "Be banished to my room probably."

The pain is hers, but it's him that flinches. Anger swirls inside his stomach at the imagined monsters he would barely know on sight. Anger that they could force anyone, let alone a girl who had done them no harm, to be alone at Christmas. Anger that they want her for the holidays she afforded them, but not when they would have to chop up an extra few carrots.

"Come here," he offers, even though he wants to demand it. "Liam, my brother, will be here and he'll bring his girlfriend, and I'll be the only idiot on my own. Unless you save me the shame."

"I don't-" she wants to say no. She _has _to say no. Because Christmas, families, she can't have that. But it'll beat staring at the same four walls while she listens to the tearing of paper and crackers exploding two walls away. "I can't," she tells him and his heart sinks as if she's attached it to an anchor.

"Hmm," he murmurs sympathetically, "I hear staring at the ceiling can be quite the time consumer."

"Fine," she snaps, "but only if you provide the rum."

oOo

His bell rings all too early Christmas morning. "Go away," he yells, pointlessly, but the knocking continues, a long succession of hammering with no pause. He rolls out of bed with a growl and stomps towards the door like a petulant child. This must be what it's like to have a three year old. He yanks open the door to find himself glaring at Emma Swan.

A warmth glows from his chest, but the daggers stay in his eyes. "Swan," he greets, curtly.

"Killian," she simpers, her face plastered with an overly innocent smile. "I brought mince pies."

"And could the mince pies not have waited until the bloody sun was up?"

She pulls out a hand from behind her back, swinging a bottle in his face. "And brandy."

He opens the door all the way. "Come inside."

She does and shoves the pies and brandy into his chest. He grunts and kicks the door shut as she throws herself onto his couch, tucking her feet in beside her. He stares, something pulsing with the warmth in his chest that he cannot name. But he notices the way her hair curls around her face in a frame that shields her, and how she bends her toes, like she's maybe a little nervous. He notices how she stretches her arm out over the back of the couch, like she's trying to claim a space of her own, but keeps herself crushed up, afraid to take up too much.

He wants her to take up his whole apartment. He wants to find her t-shirt strewn over the foot of the bed and her toothbrush knocking against his. He wants to trip over her shoes when he walks through the door and shove her empty glasses aside to make room for his. He wants to have to wash up a plate to put his food on because she hasn't done it in days and have to reach down the back of the couch for the remote after she knocked it back there when she fell asleep in front of the TV.

But he's not allowed to want that stuff. He's not allowed to want _her. _She'll never want him; he's not sure she can.

But as he waits for two mince pies to heat up, he realises with a painful and wonderful twist that he never thought he could either.

oOo

She's wishing she hadn't come. He knows by the way her fingers stroke her glass for something to do before she downs it all and pours herself another measure, being a little too generous. He swoops in beside her and brushes a fleeting hand against the back of her head. She looks up with a faint smile that doesn't touch her eyes.

His brother and Claire have just arrived and they're staring at Emma like she's just pulled herself out of a trash can. Well, Claire is. Liam's smirking as if she's a wood carving he chiselled himself. "How old are you?" he asks Emma, bluntly, and Claire hits him.

Emma smiles. "Fourteen."

Liam gapes, then smirks. "Taking tips from your ex, Killian?" he teases, but Killian glares at him, his heart raging against his ribcage. He's not allowed to mention that. He's not even allowed to whisper around the subject.

"She's seventeen," he growls.

But Emma's eyebrows are arched in interest and he can see the question dangling on the tip of her tongue. He points the remote at the TV and Donkey flashes on screen. "Let's watch _Shrek." _Even Liam senses better than to argue.

oOo

Liam snatches Emma's brandy from his hand as he goes to pour them all a drink. "You're underage, little brother," he chirps. "And so is your young sweetheart."

"_She's seventeen," _Killian growls at the same time as Emma says: "I am so _not _his sweetheart."

Liam winks and pours them both a glass. Emma downs hers immediately.

"I like her," Liam decides.

Emma shrugs. "You're okay I suppose."

It is the first time Emma has joined them (although _Claire _has been lingering for years), but it feels more like Christmas than it has since his father dressed in a Santa suit when Killian was three and left a handwritten note back to his son, complete even with a hoof print from Rudolph. She even pulls a cracker with him over the Chinese takeaway and puts on the stupid hat with a laugh.

She is still wearing that hat when Claire and Liam finally say goodbye, Liam pulling them both in for a hug. His arms catches her before she can dodge his grasp and Killian sees the stone that takes her body until his brother lets go.

When at last the door shuts behind them, he sees the twisted half smile on her face that leaves him with an ache to promise her every Christmas from now, but their relationship is still too fragile. He doesn't even know if she will accept tomorrow.

She did not even accept his number on her cell until he stole it while she was in the bathroom and put himself in, under the name 'Captain Hook' to confuse her. Then he took the opportunity to change the others too, since they were so sadly lacking. Her foster parents became Mr and Mrs Dursley, her social worker Pepper Potts, and someone named Vanessa was rechristened Donna Noble.

Two days later, he got a phone call from Katniss Everdeen, who sounded an awful lot like Liam.

He gives her paper crown a gentle flick. "Suits you," he teases.

"So do you," she murmurs and crushes her lips against his.

oOo

It is well into the new year before she brings it up. But one dark hour of the morning (literally dark, dawn is not even brushing the sky and he can still hear her foster parents crashing around on the floor above them), with her leg draped across his so he is pinned in the trap, she does.

"Just how much older than me are you used to?" she taunts, like they're dancing circles in the playground and suddenly she is poison seeping into his skin. He shoves her from him, wrenching his body out of the entanglement and sits up.

She laughs, shakily. "C'mon, Killian, I have to know my competition."

He turns to her, shaking with rage, so that every word is a direct hit. "She's not your competition; she's someone you can never hope to match. You're just an easy screw." He watches the laughter drop from her face and curl to smouldering ashes between them.

He watches her drop her head so he can no longer see and slip away, gathering her clothes as she moves, with a sheet hiding her whole self from him. He watches the closed door of the bathroom, hearing her gently padding feet and then a loud thump. There's a gap of silence and his heart is thumping outside of his chest, but then he hears the lock click and watches the door swing open, revealing her masked and clothed.

Then he stumbles behind her and watches her disappear through the front door she once pounded on, letting all of his neighbours into their sex life; the one she used to wake him up with the dawn of Christmas morning, and he knows she will not knock again.

oOo

All the same, he keeps hoping that she will and when the silence on the other side is only broken by hurrying footsteps and snippets of strangers' conversations, he tunes into the noises above him. He does not know where her room is and he forces himself not to listen in each one of his until he finds it: there is a fine line between romantic and creepy and it would be bad form to cross it.

It was bad form to say_ that. _

He sits for stretches longer than he should with his finger hovering over the keypad of his phone, but his mind is blank of what to say.

_Sorry I crushed your heart, Swan. _

He doesn't know how to tell her he didn't mean it; that she is far more than just a screw, easy or otherwise, and he thinks he might be falling in love with her. He could always be totally cliché and knock on her door with that declaration, but he's sure as hell that she won't react well to such a lame gesture.

But he doesn't know what else to do. His door has never been so silent.

oOo

He marks her birthday on his calendar, the days counting to when she will move out of the apartment upstairs and out of his life. He's almost afraid to leave his home, in case she goes early and he misses her. Her phone number means nothing when she won't pick up his calls. He still hasn't figured out how to say he's sorry.

oOo

He thinks he has another two days of her when he hears the door above him slam, and then there's a succession of thumps, another slam and silence. He bursts out of his front door, piecing the sounds together to form a slideshow to go with them. There's only one flight of stairs to fly down before he reaches the final door to the street and he bursts through it, expecting a blurred figure in the distance, feet pounding on the sidewalk and a final chase, but instead he almost crashes right into her.

"Swan!" he blurts, as if she is the last person he expected to see.

"For once I wanted to be the one that walked away," she tells the air in front of her. "But two steps out of the door and I remember I don't have anywhere to walk to."

He clenches his hand by his side so it doesn't reach for her.

"I know moving downstairs doesn't have quite the same dramatic effect," he quips with a lazy smile that doesn't reflect the slamming heart inside his chest. "But my sofa-couch -doesn't have any diseases." He'd offer his bed, hell, he'd give her the entire apartment, but to slip the world behind her walls he's going to have to hand it to her item by item. Starting with some lumpy cushions.

"I'm good out here, thanks." There's a breeze in her voice as if she's only just realised who she's talking to and a claw of desperation tears at his insides, because if she leaves he won't see her again, and she has nowhere to go.

"Her name was Milah," he murmurs, looking at her to call strength in his voice. "She was my teacher. Of course everyone thought she took advantage of me, that I was just a stupid little boy, but she was fresh out of college and I was in my final year. She was only four years older than me, and I loved her." He says the last part like a lion protecting her young and he sees a flicker run through Emma's blank eyes.

"But she was married to her high school boyfriend. She never admitted anything, but I know she was scared of him. She was never even sure she wanted to marry him, but he was persistent and more or less dragged her down the aisle. When he found out about us-" he breaks off suddenly, as if speaking the next part out loud is a magic utterance to cast the curse. "He took a gun to her head. Dragged her out right in front of me and said he was going to kill her. He was going to make me watch. The police got him, his gun went off but it missed. She went to prison though," he concludes with a bitter twist.

"Last I saw her, she didn't want to see me. Said she wasn't going to ruin my life like she's ruined her own. She got seven years and refused to let me wait for her. She said she wouldn't be with me when she got out even if I did. It took me a long time to accept that, I didn't ever want to let go, and you-"

"Were an easy screw?"

He closes his eyes, as if that can protect him from her anger, her hurt.

"Were a rebound," he corrects. "But even after the first time, I knew I wanted there to be a next."

"Great, thanks."

It's not the reaction he was hoping for, but he's told her about Milah, he's told her everything and she's still standing there. Everyone else but Liam left an empty space.

"I was disappointed. When you weren't there in the morning. I woke up hoping you would be." She scowls, but he sees the glimmer behind it: a blend of daring hope and crushing sadness. "You're far more to me than just a body in my bed, Emma." At that, she flinches.

"So what, is this the part where I'm supposed to kiss you and then we skip off arm in arm?"

"Well, no. I should imagine the less favourable souls around here would throw their empty bottles at us if we skipped, but my sofa is still for the offering if you feel that would be more comfortable than a park bench." He hears her protest before she opens her mouth and silences it. "No strings. You don't even have to talk to me."

"I've been tossed out of twelve foster homes," she answers.

"I'm not your father, love. I won't ground you for coming in at 2am."

She's shaking her head, her curls tumbling around her face so he cannot see, but he can already hear the no poisoning the air around them, because she's lived with strangers, people who have probably done things to her he doesn't want to think about, but she'd rather live in a literal box than with him.

"Neal," she announces and it finally stirs a reaction from him that isn't fear.

"I'm sorry?"

"The guy that broke my heart," she mutters to her shoes. He's told his whole story, laid it out between them for her to stomp all over if she wishes, but he knows this mere name is all he's going to get from her. He doesn't mind though. There was a time she wouldn't even give him her own.

There's a shaking gap of silence.

"I'm not doing your laundry for you." She's still shaking her head, but instead of refusal it's a smirk that laces her voice and he doesn't realise how scared he was until his legs tremble with the force of his relief.

"Ironing?" he grins.

"Not unless you like your clothes toasted."

"Dinner?"

"I can do that."

He fights his grin, because he feels like it's going to split his face and bleeding all over her would not win him any points. He reaches for her case, knowing before it even twitches that her hand will slap his away. Then her elbow digs into his side.

"Hope you like Poptarts."

**So I hope the ending wasn't too flat or disappointing. I didn't want the cliché happily ever after, because Emma's still hurt, but I couldn't keep writing forever, so I thought dangling on a thread of hope was as good of a place as any. I was also testing out a different style here, I'm not used to spanning time in this way, so I hope that wasn't a total car crash. **


End file.
